Dr Ramakanta Panda On Why Bankers, Techies Most Susceptible To Heart Disease

Eighty percent of Dr Ramakanta Panda's young cardiac patients — below 35, below 40 — work in IT or finance. Late nights, processed food, 2 AM pizza, secondhand smoke, and a generation that doesn't sleep before midnight. The Padma Bhushan awardee and Chairman of Asian Heart Institute, Mumbai has performed over 30,000 cardiac surgeries with a 99.8% bypass success rate and zero MRSA in his ICU — all from one hospital he has refused to franchise, refused to debt-finance, and refused to sell to private equity. Every week, he says no. In this episode of The Morning Brief, ET's pharma editor Vikas Dandekar and Rica Bhattacharyya sit down with Dr. Panda on why India cannot fix its healthcare issues by solely relying on private healthcare — and whether one hospital built on culture can set standards an industry built on capital never will.